While watching some Anime that the kids enjoy watching on Saturday mornings, a character appeared that was so similar to this great video game villan, I just HAD to find these videos. The first, being the original, the second being a rather amusing techo-mashup.
After all, what technologist would be raising his kids properly, without them knowing such uber-geeky things.
Enjoy these classics!
Weather was not the best this morning. Sunny but a fair bit of wind. So I ended up waiting until 16:00 to pack up 4 of the rockets and head out. We took:
Lucky for you readers, I forgot to take my camera so no video, no photos, just a quick accounting (for my records really).
We picked up 2 packs of mini-motors at the hobby shop. A set of 1/2A4-T (twice the power of the mini’s used previous in the Swift and SkyStreak), and pack of A10-PT which has A LOT more power than the 1/4A’s, something like 4 to 8x the power. We’d already had issues finding the little swift with the small motors. However it is wearing it’s new all-orange paint scheme so, I was willing to ‘risk it’.
Following the re-construction and repainting of the rocket, it’s nose-down descent profile does not seem to have improved. There is a certain amount of danger in one of these things coming down nose first at maximum velocity, so I’m considering permanent retirement of this specific rocket.
1/2A3-4T – (8.3 Newtons thrust) This motor has a max thrust of 8.3 Newtons, which has quite a bit more power than the engine we first used (1/4A3-3T – 4.9 Newtons). Against a white sky, this put the high-vis mini-rocket completely out of site. Thankfully the change to hi-vis orange was critical to use finding the rocket. The engine ejected as designed (un-recovered) but the rocket still descended nose down.
A10-PT – (13.0 Newtons thrust) First off. Don’t use this engine in a rocket. It has a max thrust of 13.0 Newtons. Plenty to get a rocket off the pad. HOWEVER, it turns out the ‘P‘ designation means ‘plugged‘. Plugged engines have no ejection charge. This completely explains why the two flights we made with this motor, the rocket cam down very rapidly with engine still in the body. There seemed to be a trace but NO ejection charge of any kind. With that much additional thrust the little rocket was quickly out of sight! GONE! Hasta la Vista baby!! Again, because of the high fis paint, I spotted the fins of the 4″ rocket sticking out of the grass about 150 yards away (thank God for my still better than 20/20 vision at age 45). I have 2 more of these engines, not sure what I’ll do with them now. :/
First flights for this school project class rocket. This was also my daughters first rocket project! It came out great and I have to say it flew great too! This is a streamer recovery rocket, like the Hi-Flier so it can be used in smaller fields.
A8-5 – (10.7 Newtons Thrust) First flights should always be done with a smaller motor. This specific rocket does not have an engine retainer (engine ejection expected?) but also has the streamer recovery with nose-blow actuation already noted. Flight was perfect. Straight up! Most predicatable flying rocket we have right now. Engine ejected (recovered) and so did the streamer. Rocket landed close to launch location. Could not have asked for a better launch evolution.
B6-4 – (12.1 Newtons) Sure, I like to push it a bit. We were able to visually track the rocket with the A engine. Launch put the rocket out of my visual range. Again, the high-vis orange allowed a recovery. Unfortunately, this time the engine did not eject from the rocket bods and it descended a little faster than before. Upon landing the fin with launch lug attached was snapped off. They were located together so it’s very unlikely it happend during flight. Back to repair shop for this one.
Another lesson learned the hard way, camouflage paint on a rocket might ‘look’ cool but in practice it’s a real pain in but to find them once they land. One thing to note about this rocket. Fly in light wind only. the CP (Center of Pressure) is far enough behind the CG (Center of Gravity) that it windcocks like mad in even a breeze. Windcock? That means it turns upwind due to the aerodynamic pressure on the over-sized fin area. Despite directing the launch rod slightly downwind on the 2nd lauch it still curved upwind.
A8-5 (10.7 Newtons Thrust) – This rocket has been flown many times with this engine. The difference this time time? The streamer did not unravel! Perhaps having it packed in the body all week awaiting our next trip to the range formed it into a ball. Whatever the reason, the thing came down like a rock from 600+ feet, landing with nice little thud, only a few yards away. No damage noticed on vehicle. Ready to launch again.
C6-5 ( 15.3 Newtons thrust) – Why not tempt fate a bit, right? Again he rocket turned up wind. With the higher impulse engine it really REALLY took off. With the 5 second tracking trace I was able to spot it pretty easily in the sky. While visually tracking it, a hoopie-mobile drove past my car making a sound like it had hit it! This distracted me (and my son). I was unable to visually re-acquire the rocket. Having lost a track on it, combined with my brilliant idea to paint it in a camouflage pattern, IT’S LOST. We walked the entire downrange area and after 30 minutes decided to call off the search. So far, it’s not been recovered.
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Our roof top tardy Rocket flies again! This is another one of those really nice fliers. Good aerodynamic balance. This is the rocket that came in our launch kit, and the 1st one we built. Also the one that was lost on the roof of the Gym for a day, eventually taking a short bath in the rain gutter of the school. There is some damage to the lower section of the main body, a little delamination of the tube and somewhat of a soft spot. It’s flying just find though.
The last time we used a larger motor (a B engine) we lost it on top of the school. Since that time I’ve cut 6 1″ slits in the top of the parachute, and most recently opened up a large hole in the center of the chute to further accelerate it’s descent. A good decision.
C6-5 ( 15.3 Newtons thrust) – I had a few of these engines laying around that were given to me (age unknown). Time to use up another motor. Lift off was again straight up. And up, and up! GONE! It went into the low clouds and was GONE. Oh boy. A few seconds later I was able to see it coming down on it’s chute. Yeah! Except it seemed a little too far away, and still drifting downwind. It quickly became clear this was NOT going to land in our LZ. We watched as it drifted above the school and finally out of view over the roof.
Told the boy to pack the gear and hop in the car. If we were lucky it would have completely cleared the entire school and we’d be able to find it. The school is no longer used and most of the grounds are closed off with cyclone fencing making search really difficult. As luck would have it, as I pulled into on of the parking lots on the other side of the school, I noticed something like a pile of trash (amounts all the rest of the trash) right in front of the car that looked odd. Walking over to it, I saw the rocket under the white parachute and completely in tact. YES! Got lucky and got the rocket back! I’m thinking of removing the chute completely and going to a streamer recovery on this one too.
I finally located an engine chart for the motors that Estes builds. The Estes Rocketry website had nothing but dead links. Luckily their websites is wildly insecure, providing an OPEN INDEX of the their downloads directory.
The direct link to the current engine chart is here: Estes Engine Chart PDF. I’ve also downloaded the sheet and am hosting here on my blog, just in case they move it again. Estes Engine Chart
Wind: Don’t launch in wind, it will just frustrate recovery, and if you have a model with over-sized fins it could mean it that it will run far up-range and possibly make recovery unavailable.
Paint: There is a reason space agencies paint test rockets in orange, they want to be able to see them. The same goes for model rockets. Sure, it’s nice to give them slick paint jobs, nice starburst fades, cool colors and all that. However, if you are unable to keep an eye on the rocket (it’s small, it flyies too high, whatever) painting it in a not-so-cool boring high-vis orange is a BIG plus. Right now I’m repainting the black sections of our Taser in orange for easier location if it goes out of visual range again, as I suspect it will.
LOL. I don’t know why this keeps coming up as the next related video, after my cheesy rocket launches, and I’m sure at some point it won’t, so I’m saving this for posterity.
It’s truely, some of Shatner’s best ‘work’.
ENJOY!
AT&T promised us MMS by the end of summer. Well, they clearly missed that date because it’s already fall!
BUT.. they did get it released to us, TODAY.
Some people have been reporting very slow downloads of the Carrier Updates (the iPhone itself has supported the feature since iPhone 3.1, just not for us in America stuck with AT&T). But once the update downloads and installs, you will need to reboot your iPhone to get the feature working.
What does it look like when you have iPhone MMS? Well, a new camera icon appears on your MMS page.
Click the icon, and you have the option of taking a photo or using one from your iPhone photo library. Attach to the message, type your text and viloa… welcome to 2006! It’s been so long it’s almost novel again.
Now if only AT&T would quit screwing us the really great feature they plan to block forever, ‘Tethering’. Might as well just jailbreak the phone.
While riding the ferry to Seattle yesterday, I could not help but overhear a conversation between what was most certainly (in my eye) a heavily Liberal leaning older woman, and a pair of travelers from the UK.
Talk of Tony Blair, George Bush and Gordon Brown (whom the travelers thought was a complete mistake), eventually moved onto the topic of health care. This sparked my interest.
It’s a single point. An opinion from one person whom lives in the UK, and is very familiar with England’s version of Universal Healthcare;
WA Liberal:
“How do you like your healthcare?”
He’s simple frank response.
UK Traveler:
“Rubbish!”“I’ve been waiting since April for a checkup.”
“If you have an emergency, you can get treatment.”
I would certainly hope so!!
So.. straight from the mouths of those the live under Socialized Health Care.
“RUBBISH”.
It was sad, but again slightly amusing, listening the Liberal try to paint our world leading health care as ‘as almost as bad as that in the UK’. Hm.. well, with Obama.. soon our health care will be worse!
At least this Liberal, and I think many more than the Democrats want to admit, think that changing the entire system to help a few with under or no insurance is a BAD idea. Anyone that’s been in a Federal program (like the V.A.) probably has an opinion on the ability of the Federal Government to administer any thing more that nt. purchase of $5000 toilets.
Now, there’s change we can all get on board with, right? Personally, this is not the sort of ‘Change’ I want, and, other than a core group of fanatics, neither does anyone else.
Once I let the oldest launch her first rocket, she was hooked! We spent the rest of the morning burning up about $40 of engines in the rockets. I’d been trying to get her to at least join us to see if she would like to get into model rocketry. Being a ‘girl’ she insisted that she could not because it’s a ‘boy thing’. Happily she disposed of that preconception and was soon anxious to build her own rocket!
After a birthday party event, we headed to the hobby shop to let her pick out whatever rocket she wanted to build. After much deliberation, she selected the ‘Viking Research’ multi-configuration rocket used by the schools (this is probably the same kit I built in Jr. High School!).
It did not take long to go through the checklist and get the number of fins selected (options ranged from 3 to 5) and which way to mount them on the body tube (there are 4 different ways to mount them, which means you can come up with some interesting designs!).
This is what she decided upon:
A couple of days later, once everything was dried, a few coats of primer were applied and the final color painted we had this gem of a rocket! I look forward to flying it this weekend, and I think she does too!
A few other rockets are in the boxes, ready to be built. But first a couple of the already constructed models need some work. The most urgent of which is the little Swift 220.
After the first launch, we lost it for a while! It took 30 minutes to find the thing. And the reasons were clear.
As you might guess, this was hard to find! This is what it looked like when we finally found it!
After stripping off the extra fins, and sanding to take off the dark paint.. we have this little mess. Lots of work to do on such a little rocket.
It was another fine Saturday morning at our secret launch location. This time we had a fleet of rockets lined up and ready to go, including the little Swift 220! It was our first day with the little Mini ‘T’ motor rockets.
4 Rockets in total are on the schedule for launch.
As you can see in the video, it lifted off very quickly with a 1/4A3-4T motor, the smallest one Estes makes for any of it’s rockets. Even with that tiny motor is was GONE! It took us 30 minutes to find the rocket.
When we finally did locate it, this is what we found. The rocket did not execute a tumble descent, but instead came straight down like a dart, embedding itself, nose down in the grass. Glad it only weight .56 oz.!
I originally bought this rocket for my daughter, but she totally refused to even look at it, much less show ANY interest at all in such things. However, when you listen to the video you’ll hear her helping with the countdown. I’m glad she changed her mind
Sadly, this rocket did not exactly ‘perform’. The only person I have to blame for that is myself though. The smallest recommended motor is a 1/2A3-4T but nobody in town had any, so I just put in one of the 1/4A3-4T motors thinking… so it won’t got really high. Won’t go high. So, when they have an engine recommendation, it’s probably best to stick with it.
The Hi-Flier was next on the pad. This rocket has flown a number of times already, but only on the smallest A series engines I had. Even using a small A, it really get’s some height, and the first one launch we had, it was almost lost, coming down on the edge of a fence quite some ways down range. This video only shows the lauch… because I just could not keep up with tracing this little missile.
It landed quite a ways away on the field, but recovery was pretty easy. By this time both kids were running around the field tracking, chasing and recovering rockets. 🙂
The last rocket of the day.
The last time we flew this rocket on B series engine, we lost it to the roof of the school. Since that time I’d made some modifications to the parachute, removing quit a bit of it’s drag. This should have dropped it from altitude much faster, and landed it closer to our launch location.
In the end, it landed almost atop the same roof we lost it on last time. Missing it by maybe 6′, probably less. We did get it back. Later that night I further modified the chute with a 7th opening in the top center to hopefully further reduce the glide (float?) ratio on descent.
Next round of launches are scheduled for September 26th.
The Estes Big Bertha is one of the old-school rockets from my youth. Never built one, but I’m thinking more and more about it with the boy getting into this, and wanting to put large payloads up in the air.
While looking or a decent photo of the thing, I ran across this video of a Big Bertha rocket with video payload. Now.. this is pretty neat. Looking at the lauch areas these people are using, there is no reason we should not be able to pull this off at our ‘secret launch site’.
There is a shorter version of the same rocket, that I’m considering building and painting up like an old WWII V2.
Something to do while it rains.
That gives me 9 months to finish it.
I had not built nor flown model rockets in decades. Having recently been given a couple of ‘antique’ Estes rockets the weekend before, I was bitten by the bug again. And based upon the reaction of #2 prodigy, it was a shared affliction.
So we embarked on the adventure that is building and launching model rockets. Of course, as with any space endeavor there are risks to go along with it. And sometimes, you loose an entire spaceship.
Here are some videos from the last couple of days at the ‘launch site’, hosted on YouTube (for lack of a better place to host them).
First launch of our first Rocket, the Estes TASER. This is one of the E2X rocket serious from Estes. Quick and easy to build. Just about 1 hour of time, mainly to let glue dry.
We took our pre-painted rocket and the launching system that came in it’s kit, out to a local field and tried out luck at launching rockets.
LAUNCH 1 – TASER + A8-5 motor
This was a very successful launch. Everything went well, and the rocket was successfully recovered.
LAUNCH 2 – TASER + A8-5 motor
The second launch, also went without a hitch. This time I did a better job of tracking it with the little Canon digital camera, using it’s built-in video capability. I think it works OK. Prodigy is seen running to recover the vehicle.
LAUNCH 3 – TASER + B6-4 motor
Everything went perfectly, right up to the point it left the pad. I don’t know if you can tell from the difference in Launch 2 and this, but the rocket really ripped off the pad and basically dissappeared, until the tracking smoke trail emerged.
Then things got worse. It caught a wind aloft that carried it out over the school gym. We searched for 30 minutes, probably more. The rocket: LOST.
Having just lost our first spacecraft, we set out in the Earth Rover (aka ML430, it sort of looks like a rover) to the place where they sell rocket building materials, Micheal’s Crafts (the local hobby shop is poaching an additional 20-25% for everything.. I’m happy to support local businesses but really.. that’s just a little TOO steep a price).
Not wanting to invest a large sum on another lost rocket, I located this kit:
Most of the construction was completed on Saturday night. Painting, however, took at lot longer.
Once the paint was dried, we still had a few hours of daylight to launch. The wind was kicking up, and this rocket is supposed to fly to twice the height of the one we lost the day before. This one, however recovers with a streamer. Thought here is that it will be far less likely to catch a winds-aloft current and drift out of the recovery area. You know what they say about plans….
Once back out on the launch site, the previous day’s lost rocket revealed itself. Having blown across the roof and into the gutter of the gym. Parachute clearly in view, part of one fin is also visible to the right, sticking out of the gutter.
Unfortunate part is that this is on the root of a gym, and although a lower section, it’s a good 12′ or more in the air. I don’t typically carry 14′ ladders in my car so recovery seemed damn near impossible.
So, off we go, into the wild blue yonder!
It has been 8 years now since that horrible morning in 2001 when a 4 planes, commandeered by cowards, murdered US Citizens and struck at us, hoping to shake the very foundation of this great land.